This is the story behind my song 'Perfume'. The background picture is my well travelled and well weathered copy. One of the only books I have read over and over again. I can't explain my fascination with it apart from that I have a strange attraction to such a sick, twisted story line, examining a darker side of life, and written with such conviction that you actually feel compassion for this horrible man who is a spiteful murderer.

Synopsis

A taste

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Film

Song

Suskind

Perfume; a taste.

Below are some great passages from the book.


In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots. The stench of sulfur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease. The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces.The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master’s wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the king himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter.

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He hesitated a moment, looked around him to make sure no one was watching, lifted the basket and lowered his fat nose into it. Expecting to inhale an odour, he sniffed all around the infant's head, so close to it that the thin reddish baby hair tickled his nostrils. He did not know exactly how babies' heads were supposed to smell. Certainly not like caramel, that much was clear, since caramel was melted sugar, and how could a baby that until now had drunk only milk smell like melted sugar? It might smell like milk, like wet nurse's milk. But it didn't smell like milk. It might smell like hair, like skin and hair and maybe a little bit of baby sweat. And Terrier sniffed with the intention of smelling skin, hair and a little baby sweat. But he smelled nothing. For the life of him he couldn't. Apparently an infant has no odour, he thought, that must be it. An infant, assuming it is kept clean, simply doesn't smell, any more than it speaks, or walks, or writes. Such things come only with age. Strictly speaking, human beings first emit an odour when they reach puberty. That's how it is. That's all. Wasn't it Horace himself who wrote, 'The youth is gamey as a buck, the maiden's fragrance blossoms as does the white narcissus...'? - and the Romans knew all about that! The odour of humans is always a fleshly odour- that is, a sinful odour. How could an infant, which does not yet know sin even in its dreams, have an odour? How could it smell? Poohpee-dooh- not a chance of it!

He had placed the basket back on his knees and now rocked it gentlye. The Babe still slept soundly. Its right first, small and red, stuck out from under the cover and now and then twitcjed sweetly against his cheek. Terrier smiled and suddenly felt very cosy. For a moment he allowed himself the fantastic tought the he was the father of the child. He had not become a monk, but rather a normal citizen, and upstanding craftsman perhaps, had taken a wife, a warm wife fragrant with milk and wool, and had produced a son with her and he was rocking him here on his own knees, his own child, poohpoohpoohpeedooh... THe thought of it made him feel good. There was something so normal and right about the idea. A father rocking his son on his knees, poohpeedooh, a vision as old as the world itself and yet always new and normal, as long as the world would exist, ah yes! Terrier felt his heart glow with sentimental cosiness.

Then the child awoke. Its nose awoke first. The tiny nose moved, pushed upwards and sniffed. It sucked air in and snorted it back out in short puffs, like an imperfect sneeze. Then the nose wrinkled up, and the child opened its eyes. The eys were of an uncertain colour, between oyster grey and creamy opal white, covered with a kind of slimy film and apparently not very well adapted for sight. Terrier had the impression that they did not even perceive him. But not so the nose. While the child's dull eyes squinted into the void, the nose seemed to fix on a particular target, and Terrier had the very odd feeling that he himself, his person, Father Terrier, was that target. THe tiny wings of flesh around the two tiny holes in thye child's face swelled like a bud opening to bloom. Or rather, like the cups of that small meat-eating plant that was kept in the royal botanical gardens. And like the plant, they seemed to create an eerie suction. It seemed to Terrier as if the child saw him with its nostrils, as if it were staring intently at him, scrutinizing him, more piercingly than eyes could ever do, as if it were using its nose to devour something whole, something that came from him, from Terrier, and that he could not hold that something back or hide it... The child with no smell was smelling at him shamelessly, that was it! It was establishing his scent! And all at once he felt as if he stank, of sweat and vinegar, of choucroute and unwashed clothes. He felt naked and ugly, as if someone were gaping at him while revealing nothing to himself. The child seemed to be smelling right through his skin, into his innards. HIs most tender emotions, his filthiest thoughts lay exposed to that greedy little nose, which wasn't even a proper nose, but only a pug of a nose, a tiny perforated organ, forever crinkling and puffing and quivering. Terrier shuddered. He felt sick to his stomach. He pulled back his own nose as if he smelled something foul that he wanted nothing to do with. Gone was the homely thought that this might be his own flesh and blood. Vanished the sentimental idyll of father and son and gragrant mother - as if someone had ripped away the cosy veil of thought that his fantasy had cast about the child and himself. A strange, cold creature lay there on his knees, a hostile animal, and were he not a man by nature prudent, God-fearing and given to reason, in the rush of nausea he would have hurled it like a spider form him.

Terrier wrenched himself to his feet and set the basket on the table. He wanted to get rid of the thing as quickly as possible, right away if possible, immediately if possib.e

And then it began to wail. It squinted up its eyes, gaped its gullet wide, and gave a screech so repulsively shrill that the blood in Terrier's veins congealed. He shook the basket with an outstretched hand and shouted, 'Poohpeedooh' to silence the child, but it only bellowed more loudly and turned completely blue in the face and looked as if it would burst from bellowing.

Away with it! Thought Terrier, away this very instant with this... he was about to say 'devil', but caught himself and restrained... away with this monster, with this in-sufferable child! But away where? He knew a dozen wet nurses and orphanages in the neighbourhood, but that was too near, too cloe for comfort, get the thing further away, so far away that you couldn't hear it, so far awa that it could not be dropped on your doostep again every hour or so; if possible it must be taken to another parish, on the other side of the river would be even better, and best of all extra muros, in the fauborg Saint-Antoine, that was it! That was the place for this screaming brat, faro off to the east beyond the Bastille, where at night the city gates were locked.

And he hitched up his cassock and grabbed the bellowing basket and ran off, ran through the tangle of alleys to the rue de Faubourg Saint-Antoine, eastwards up the Seine, out of the city, far, far out to the rue de Charonne, almost to its very end, where at an address near the cloister Madeleine de Trenell, he knew there lived a certain Madame Gaillard, who took children on board no matter what age or sort, as long as someone paid for them, and there he handed over the child, still screaming, paid a year in advance, and fled back into the city, and once at the cloister cast his clothes from him as if they were foully soiled, washed himself from head to foot, and crepty into bed in his cell, crossing himself repeatedly, proaying long, and finally with some relief falling asleep.

----

The scents of the garden descended upon him, their contours as precise and clear as the colored bands of a rainbow. And that one, that precious one, that one that mattered above all else, was among them. Grenouille turned hot with rapture and cold with fear. Blood rushed to his head as if he were a little boy caught red-handed, and then it retreated to his solar plexus, and then rushed up again and retreated again, and he could do nothing to stop it. . . . For an eternity it seemed to him, time was doubled or had disappeared completely, for he no longer knew whether now was now and here was here . . . - that is, the rue des Marais in Paris, September 1753. The scent floating out of the garden was the scent of the redheaded girl he had murdered that night. To have found that scent in this world once again brought tears of bliss to his eyes - and to know that it could not possibly be true frightened him to death. . . .

Collecting himself and gaining control of his senses, he began to inhale the fatal scent in short, less dangerous breaths. . . . To be sure, it also came from a redheaded girl, there was no doubt of that. In his olfactory imagination, Grenouille saw this girl as if in a picture. . . .

He wanted truly to possess the scent of this girl behind the wall; to peel it from her like skin and to make her scent his own.